Sandisk
Program Manager, People Experience
Hybrid · Milpitas, CA 95035
About the role
About the Role As a People Experience Program Manager, you will independently lead the orchestration and delivery of highly visible, enterprise-wide People (HR) programs, including compensation planning, performance, listening, benefits, and other employee experience initiatives that require disciplined execution across functions, systems, regions, and stakeholder groups. This role serves as the connection across People Experience, Compensation, Benefits, IT, Communications, Payroll, Finance, Legal, and business stakeholders to translate strategy into scalable execution. With the Center of Excellence teams shaping the strategy, you will partner in converting those strategies into program execution plans, governance routines, launch-ready experiences, and adoption mechanisms that support successful enterprise delivery. Success in this role requires experienced program leadership, strong judgment, and the ability to influence outcomes without direct authority in ambiguous, sensitive, and time-bound environments. You will drive momentum across complex workstreams, align stakeholders on decisions and trade-offs, anticipate and resolve risks, and maintain accountability for outcomes that affect leaders, employees, and cross-functional delivery teams.
Essential Duties and Responsibilities:
- Program Strategy & Execution
- Translate People program strategy, policy requirements, and business priorities into end-to-end program execution plans that define outcomes, roadmaps, milestones, dependencies, readiness checkpoints, success measures, and roles (through a RACI matrix) across teams and functions.
- Coordinate and track systems (e.g. Workday) readiness with program strategy owner, IT, and digital experience teams including areas such as testing/UAT, issue triage, reporting, data validation, approvals, launch readiness, and closeout.
- Lead program management for People Experience initiatives, including compensation, performance, benefits, employee listening, and other enterprise employee experience programs, by bringing structure, stakeholder coordination, and execution discipline to priority work.
- Stakeholder Management & Influence
- Align cross-functional partners on requirements, dependencies, timing, trade-offs, resourcing constraints, regional considerations, and business impacts to support clear decisions and disciplined execution.
- Frame options, surface risks, clarify decision owners, document recommendations, and escalate unresolved policy questions or execution barriers with concise context, implications, and recommended paths forward.
- Employee Experience & Go-to-Market Readiness
- Partner on the development of change readiness and enablement materials, including leader and HR partner guidance, program enablement content, stakeholder updates, employee-facing communications, and adoption support that help audiences understand decisions, timelines, actions, and impacts.
- Assess global and regional readiness, localize execution needs, capture lessons learned, and measure post-cycle effectiveness to drive continuous improvement across future People programs.
- Governance & Operational Excellence
- Establish and lead governance routines that clarify roles, decision rights, escalation paths, risk posture, milestone health, issue ownership, executive visibility, and post-cycle learnings.
- Manage sensitive execution across data readiness, exception governance, compliance considerations, approvals, issue resolution, stakeholder readiness, and closeout while protecting confidentiality and maintaining clear audit discipline.
Qualifications
Required:
- Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience.
- 8+ years of progressive project/program management experience with compensation, benefits, performance or change management discipline areas within global, matrixed organizations, including experience leading complex workstreams independently.
- Strong understanding of People programs, with required depth in compensation cycles, incentives, equity, job evaluation, salary structures, benchmarking, pay governance, and compliance considerations.
- Proven ability to lead complex, sensitive, time-bound programs with enterprise visibility, cross-functional dependencies, senior stakeholder engagement, and judgment under ambiguity.
- Strong advisory, collaboration, and stakeholder influence skills, with the ability to align leaders, clarify decisions, frame trade-offs, navigate ambiguity, and drive accountability across teams without direct authority.
- Advanced analytical and systems-thinking skills, with the ability to connect data, process, policy, risk, timing, governance, and employee experience into scalable execution plans and practical recommendations.
- Clear written, verbal, and visual communication skills, including the ability to create executive-ready narratives, decision materials, enablement resources, status updates, and leadership communications that make complex issues easy to understand and act on.
- Sound judgment handling confidential information while balancing business needs, governance, compliance, and employee experience.
- Experience using Workday or similar HR systems to support program readiness, reporting, approvals, issue tracking, testing/UAT, data validation, and coordination with People Technology or IT partners.
- Proficiency using project management tools to manage integrated plans, milestones, dependencies, risks, decisions, status reporting, and stakeholder follow-up.
Preferred skills:
- Workday module experience supporting cycle setup, understanding of the testing/UAT process, reporting, issue resolution, approvals, and closeout.
- Experience managing global compensation programs across merit, promotion, bonus, equity, along with the performance cycle and other talent planning programs.
- Ability to thrive in complex, matrixed environments while collaborating with diverse cross-functional partners.
- Experience building change readiness plans, leader or HRBP enablement resources, stakeholder updates, and post-cycle lessons learned that improve adoption, clarity, and future-cycle execution.